Going into early heroic boss attempts on 10man with a stable CTC while using Souldrinker, but I'm unsure if the proc on the Souldrinker is worthy of keeping it around, given the opportunity for a bit more avoidance/damage/stamina using Hand of Morchok.

Whole thread dedicated to that discussion. I believe it was determined normal SD beats H HoM, but I'll let you read (link should be to the final page, which I believe is what will answer your question.)

Fivelives wrote:Is it worth trading 17.5k health for 9% CTC, bringing me up to 95%? I don't have the gear available to hit 102.4 no matter how I try and configure it, and I haven't raided pretty much at all this expansion, so I'm limited to jp/vp and heroic drops as far as gear goes.

I doubt it. If you could reach 102.4%, you might go for broke. But while gearing up, I think it is usually best to adopt a "balanced" approach: generally speaking go with the highest ilevel gear you can get and gem for socket bonuses. That way you won't be making extreme trades between stamina and mastery and you'll be in good shape for when you finally can reach 102.4%.

In 5 mans, extra stamina or CTC are not that vital: if anything, at the margin, I would emphasise dps (squeeze in a bit of hit and expertise gear).

In DS, being CTC capped is not the "be all and end all" that it might be. There is quite a lot of heavy magic and other unblockable damage, so having a decent health pool is good.

How would you trade 17.5k for 9% CTC? If it is by trinkets, you can try both and see how they feel (I always seem to gravitate to one mastery, one stamina trinket). If it is by gemming, I would go mastery heavy but still pick up slot bonuses as per Digren's guide.

It'd be through gemming. I'm already reforged to keep parry/dodge roughly even with as much mastery as I can stack in there. I'm not all that worried about my DPS, it's pretty decent as is, even mostly skipping dps stats (13-15k overall in heroics, 10-12k on most bosses).

I'm using dual stamina trinkets, but that's mostly because I can't seem to find a mastery trinket that I can get. I've still got blues to replace (head and belt), so those take priority at the jp/vp vendors for now. If I had a reliable healer every time I was farming 5mans, I'd probably not quibble about the fairly huge stamina drop, but with the quality of most healers I've come across, the extra padding of that stamina makes me feel a bit more comfortable too.

- I'm not Jesus, but I can turn water into Kool-Aid.- A Sergeant in motion outranks an officer who doesn't know what the hell is going on.- A demolitions specialist at a flat run outranks everybody.

Fivelives wrote:It'd be through gemming. I'm already reforged to keep parry/dodge roughly even with as much mastery as I can stack in there. I'm not all that worried about my DPS, it's pretty decent as is, even mostly skipping dps stats (13-15k overall in heroics, 10-12k on most bosses).

I'm using dual stamina trinkets, but that's mostly because I can't seem to find a mastery trinket that I can get. I've still got blues to replace (head and belt), so those take priority at the jp/vp vendors for now. If I had a reliable healer every time I was farming 5mans, I'd probably not quibble about the fairly huge stamina drop, but with the quality of most healers I've come across, the extra padding of that stamina makes me feel a bit more comfortable too.

I'm still running a 359 mastery trinket from the Tol Barad dailies, it's 125 commendations. In theory you might possibly get 125 in a week of doing the dailies and winning Tol Barad if you had the time and you were a regular pvp'er; I think mine took me closer to a fortnight. Other than that, there's a fat chunk of mastery on one of the Valor trinkets once you have VPs to spare.

The ratio sounds plausible, but the magnitude implies you are contemplating a pretty extreme switch for it all to come from gemming. How do you currently gem? Before I got to CTC cap, I followed Digren's guide:

mastery in yellow/prismaticmastery+stamina in bluemastery+parry in red

I'm already reforged to keep parry/dodge roughly even with as much mastery as I can stack in there.

Sounds good so long as you are stacking mastery first, trying to equalise parry/dodge second. Reforging to mastery gives massive CTC gains; equalising parry/dodge gives very small gains in my experience and often cannot be done - after maximising mastery - given the gear available to do us.

I'm using dual stamina trinkets, but that's mostly because I can't seem to find a mastery trinket that I can get. I've still got blues to replace (head and belt), so those take priority at the jp/vp vendors for now.

The belt is great; I am weaing the helm too. Are you running LFR? That could give a lot of upgrades (I still haven't won a helm token though).

I second the recommendation for the TB token. That plus a stamina trinket would serve you well until you can spare the VPs for the trinket and even then you might want to use the TB token for some fights, e.g. Zon'ozz.

I am not sure that health is better than CTC in 5 mans if you have a weak healer; I'd be inclined to think the opposite. A bit more stamina might allow the healer to afk for a few seconds longer before waking up and saving you, but if he is not putting out enough output, blocking more could be better as there'd be less damage for him to repair.

Been busy reading here and on Wowhead. I am leveling a Protection Paladin just for the fun of it. I have to play very casual due to work and family, so I may get to play my pally once a week at best. Just looking for some basic advice on leveling and running a dungeon or two as a tank.

I have picked up a few things that should hopefully make my tanking a bit easier in the future. Thank the gods for intarwebz!

Azgaryth started life as a Human on a different server. Trying to consolidate my characters, I changed factions and servers. I had made it to level 44 before the switch. I have always wanted to be a Tauren Paladin, just seemed right. I started a Blood Elf at one point, but stopped at level 25. The "new" starting zone back in TBC was pretty good. I liked it, but just couldn't stick with a BE so I rolled the Human. Now I finally have a chance to make my Paladin what I always wanted.

Azgaryth wrote:I am leveling a Protection Paladin just for the fun of it. I have to play very casual due to work and family, so I may get to play my pally once a week at best. Just looking for some basic advice on leveling and running a dungeon or two as a tank.

Well, with all those heirlooms, you should have no problem gear wise. I would recommend using LFD as much as possible, as that's where we shine - tanking. There are very nice XP and gear rewards too, so for the time constrained, it's not a bad option.

If you've looked around this site, you will have seen theckhd's FAQ and his spec/glyph guide, which although they focus on end game, will give you good general guidance.

BS is a good profession, but you don't seem to have a second? Why not mining? It would supports levelling BS a lot. It's not time efficient, but I liked to level up BS to gear up my char. There are non-trivial gear gaps at the start of each expansion (you're coming up to one with Burning Crusade). Your heirlooms will see you through, except maybe the Cata one, but crafted gear can plug some gaps.

One tip for Burning Crusade gear: use wowhead to find quests that reward you with socketed plate gear. The inflation of gem stats means you can get a stamina heavy tank if you want.

The thought of putting in gems or enchants on anything that isn't at least 359 in this day and age seems weird to me, unless you are twinking it for PvP.

I disagree. Some of the lower quality gems and enchants are very cheap. I don't put high end gems/enchants in low end gear for alts, but I always gem/enchant everything, its like free points and gold is easy to come by anyways.

I would put better gems/enchants on lower level items, but it seems a waste if it going to be replaced quickly.

However, what I am mainly concerned with is an issue of gearing strategy. I may or may not have much ability to raid, and not sure how I will be treated as one of the new tanks in the guild in regard to drops. So my question is do I spend my valor points on best in slot items like cloak and libram? Or do I spend them on items that will help me the most right now, like the helm, brestplate or belt?

However, what I am mainly concerned with is an issue of gearing strategy. I may or may not have much ability to raid, and not sure how I will be treated as one of the new tanks in the guild in regard to drops. So my question is do I spend my valor points on best in slot items like cloak and libram? Or do I spend them on items that will help me the most right now, like the helm, brestplate or belt?

Again, any input on any part of my gear would be welcomed as well.

gronc

Cloak, Libram, Neck and Ring from VP are all safe bets as there are NO upgrades for those slots available within DS. Well, there is a 2nd Tanking Ring available within DS, but you use two rings, not one =P

After that, what I'd purchase would be the Belt since that's BiS unless you get heroic Blackhorn.

Klaudandus wrote:Fine, you can use the DPS ring if your dps don't need it. Sure it's Mastery and Hit but better than anything else, unless you have the 391 Ring from the FL Rep Quartermaster.

Mastery/Hit would be perfect itemization for me right now. I'm actually using both Valor rings at the moment. 95 crit is completely wasted itemization, but it was still an upgrade over the 378 JP ring. The Parry/Mastery ring... I'd far prefer the Mastery/Hit. Yet so far the only Strength/Stamina ring we've seen is one of the Mastery/Haste ones.

gronc2 wrote:So my question is do I spend my valor points on best in slot items like cloak and libram? Or do I spend them on items that will help me the most right now, like the helm, brestplate or belt?

It's been a while, but IIRC when I started the VP grind, the belt provided the biggest CTC upgrade bang for my VP buck and the libram one of the smallest. I would hold off on potential tier slots (helm, bp) as with LFR you have a very good chance of filling them with 384 gear and, due to set bonuses, that can be better than the 397 VP offset pieces. Once you have bought the belt and BiS pieces (and trinket) by all means fill in any slots missing tier pieces, but best to wait and see which ones the RNG gods have been unkind too first.

Last week I (finally) managed to get Souldrinker from Madness (used heroic Hand of Morchok before that). Now I started wondering. I'm progressing on Spine hc atm (hopefully it's going down tonight.........) and was wondering if it is worth it to go for expertise softcap to get more out of the weapon, or if I should keep the 'ctc > stam > dr' priority.

At the moment my stats, fully raidbuffed and with feast, are as follows;Dodge chance: 18,22%Parry chance: 18,13%Block chance: 61,05%Total 102.40%

If I would be going for 26 expertise (I managed to toy around a bit and get 485 rating, which is probably the closest I'll get to/over cap);Dodge chance: 17,02%Parry chance: 17,19%Block chance: 63,20%Total 102.41%

Do you believe the increase of 11 expertise is worth dumping 2.15% dodge/parry (while ofcourse staying at full ctc)?

First thing that comes to mind is if you have a mastery (or avoidance) trinket somewhere?Using one mastery trinket will bring you to full CTC easily. This in turns gives some flexibility in gemming where you could get, for instance, some more stamina out of yellow gemslots. Where needed you can then switch around trinkets if a fight requires it.

If you don't have a mastery trinket yet there are several options;- You should start farming Tol Barad Commendation for Mirror of Broken Images (I see you're exalted with Wardens) and buy the mastery trinket with resistance-on-use. The trinket is still insanely good because of the on-use on certain fights in Dragon Soul. Even if you have a higher ilvl trinket this one is still very good to have.- Avengers of Hyjal sell both Stay of Execution (dodge trinket) and Essence of the Eternal Flame (mastery trinket with str-on-use). I would go for the mastery trinket in your case, but that's because I'm not a big fan of the on-use of the dodge-trinket.

askmrrobot.com is a nice website you can use to optimize your gear easily after getting your trinket.

Spec and glyphsI would take out one point in Reckoning and put it in Pursuit of Justice. Reckoning is more of a filler talent and run speed never hurts.

Prime GlyphsChange glyph of HotR with Glyph of Judgement. HotR is rarely used on bosses and since threat got buffed it's mostly for increased dps. Judgement gives more singletarget dmg, but also a higher absord (even though it's still low) from your 2set.Major Glyphs- Lose Glyph of Divine Plea. If you're having mana problems then using Consecration less should solve most of your problems (I didn't even have it on my bars for a long time).- I would change Glyph of Consecration with either Glyph of Divine Protection (I love the 40% magic dmg reduction on some fights) or Glyph of Lay on Hands (a situational glyph, but better than most alternatives).